psychology

Chris McNamara stood at the overhang of what would be his final wingsuit BASE jump (parachuting or wingsuit flying from a fixed structure: building, antenna, span and Earth). A 1,500-foot drop was a conservative risk in a community that saw around 30 deaths last year. “After I took flight I had never realized how much physical strength was required in wingsuit BASE. I wasn’t nervous… Read More

Today, a group of product-focused creators — “Hooked” author Nir Eyal, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, and Greylock Partners’s Josh Elman, among others — are hoping to follow up on that newsletter’s success with the launch of Product Psychology, a weekly course on the psychology of user behavior. Read More

Whether or not we like to admit it, our relationships with our colleagues are among the most significant in our lives. Dealing with their quirks (endearing or otherwise) can take up as much time as actually working. A startup called Good.co wants to make it easier for co-workers to get along by taking research from organizational psychology and distilling it into a series of… Read More

Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succombs to her habit throughout the day. She can’t help it; she’s compulsively hooked.
Yin is an Instagram addict. Read More

According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, there is a common reaction to product choice. The study, produced by Juliano Laran and Keith Wilcox, found that “rejecting an option may make you more likely to choose it later.”
The gist is this: when you reject one item based on features, those features become more important when you go to select the same type of device later. Read More

Shocking news, everyone! Age plays a factor in how we figure out web site navigation! According to a new study in the journal Psychology & Marketing, younger kids do better with maps and visual “learning clues” while older kids are better at scanning lists of content. Read More

Good news for older gamers: that secret desire to rush your enemies’ base can be healthy! A study published in the medical journal Psychology & Aging shows that playing games like Rise of Nations and other real-time strategy titles can actually help elderly gamers maintain or improve their ability to reason, and help them with short term memory.
To me, this seems like a great thing. Read More